Possibilities for a quality issue if copied content outranks the original one

John Mueller of Google says that there might be a site quality issue in case a copied content is consistently ranking going above the original source. Muller addresses this topic while he was recording for Google Search Central SEO on March 12.

Mohammad Mehdi Abbas, a site owner, tells Mueller about the stealing of his original content, which other sites are republishing. This stolen content is now ranking above his own site. He asks Mueller how he can protect his site from content theft. Also, he wants to know how to prevent the copied content from ranking above his own content.

Mueller says that there may be an issue with the site quality if this is the problem that’s happening. A site owner can come to discover their content which is getting republication on another site without any permission. Then the owner can look for DMCA takedown processes.

This is going to allow the site owner to report the stolen content to google on the basis of per-page. If the content is proven as stolen without permission, then Google may remove that page from the search result.

As the process of DMCA is legal, Mueller declines to provide any kind of specific advice about when and how it needs to be used. According to him, the primary action that you can take is depending on the situation with the look into the DMCA process.

Mueller thus suggests reassessing the site quality if the copied content manages to secure a rank higher than the original one. According to Mueller, Google is going to be able to determine which site to trust based on the overall quality.

Site quality is always a challenging one to assign a measurement to. As there are no tools that can calculate how Google perceives the quality of the site. However, there is no need for any tool to determine if your site needs an improvement or not.